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Rating: A lot of nice folks hang around the vicinity of Nashville (TN)...
There's Haven Hamilton, a redneck teetering on the brink of caricature, who doesn't do politics because "he supports all parties"; proud of His Tennessee to the point of exclaiming with fury "We're not in Texas! We're in Tennessee!", just as Lady Pearl is proud of her Catholic faith, the same as JFK, loved, mourned, bitterly extolled. And his son Buddy, a submissive mama's boy, the prototype of future "American idiots". Then there's John Triplette, a white-collar of the most nasty and mean kind, with a name that says it all, as he was able to screw over three people (Barbara, Tom, Sue).
Barbara Jean, a living symbol of distress and neurosis, perpetually on the brink of a breakdown, iconographically a Madonna: her Passion is precisely that of faded USA ideals. And her boyfriend-manager Barnett, who would do anything for her, even deal with the worst weasels: he will be outsmarted by Triplette. He shares his devotion for Barbara with an anonymous little soldier who follows her everywhere, seeing her as a beacon of grace after the horrors of Vietnam. Then there's Del Reese, a pater familias so busy gathering support for the Replacement Party that he doesn't notice his wife Donna having an affair with the pretty boy of the moment, the singer Tom Frank, false as Judas, both as a musician (a fake-rocker, fake-leftist, actually "yielding" to the most pathetic and reactionary country) and as a man (a multiple seducer, with the sulkiness of a "dark and handsome" man and the phallus always pointing in the same direction). He even seduced Opal, a cynical and pretentious journalist, always ready to put her ego at the center of her tedious reports on America's woes. Even the blacks don't come off well: Tommy Brown, the "blackest white of the whites," pitiful in the role of a bronco-billy forcibly pulled from the ghetto to show everyone that the South isn't racist.
Over all and above all, Phillip Walker, his voice, his ideas, his terrible vision of the future States (those of Bush Jr).
There's also Elliott Gould. And there's Connie White, waiting for nothing more than Barbara Jean's last breath. Then there's a good man, of a certain age, with a gravely ill wife, the lodger with the mysteriously always locked violin case and his niece Martha, aspiring starlet, like so many other creatures circling the Bicentennial caravan; like Sueleen Gay, a stunning redhead with a clucking voice, humiliated but happy to perform at the Parthenon on the Great Day, the day America once again plunges into the Nightmare, only to rise promptly in the most epic and moving way: it's the funny Albuquerque who keeps the show going, with wonderful flubs; it is she who manages, in five unforgettable minutes, to release the emotions withheld by the chilly Altman for almost three hours of film; thanks to her strength, the American people, the families, the children finally become the protagonists of a film without protagonists and take responsibility for the survival of the Great Nation in the times to come.
The ending of Nashville remains one of the most artistically and conceptually elevated moments of the Seventh Art: from that tragedy exorcised by the familiar and warm notes of old country, from that disheveled blonde who in her unexpected and impromptu number seems to bear the trauma of an entire people, from that indistinct crowd singing "It don't worry me" pass moments of clear sociology and bitter poetry.
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